S U P E R F I C T I O N S

Thomas Kuhn

An American philosopher of science who has virtually made the term paradigm change his own through his influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

eg Flash Art over the last few years

He disagrees with Sir Karl Popper as to whether these changes occur like one huge nervous breakdown afflicting the dominant paradigm, or whether it comes like a series of small earth tremors. Paul Feyerabend has successfully synthesised both ideas.

The computer scientist Margaret Masterman (in a paper published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge) has identified 23 distinct ways in which Kuhn uses the term paradigm change (in his 1962), ranging from likening it to a pack of cards and all the games contained within that closed system to a dominant scientific theory.

1906 was the year of the great paradigm changes with Picasso's invention of analytical cubism and its overturning of the paradigm of Western perspective, and also the year Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity and overturned Newtonian mechanics. The mental manipulation and internal mapping of time and space is also evident in both Picasso's later synthetic cubist works and in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

The Biennale of Sydney 2002 | Elevator Surfing | Encyclopaedia of Superfictions | The Manhattan Archives | The Art Fair Murders | Book Reviews | International Portrait Gallery | The Changing Room | The El Greco Search Engine | Press Office | Museum Shop | Current Writing | The Sorbonne Conference | Superfictions Phd | Basement - Plato's Cave